All posts tagged ‘storage’

When I was in college, many years ago, my media library existed on a wooden rack that held my DVDs, VHS tapes, and CDs. I would select the media I wanted to listen to or watch and put it in a player. Now, well over a decade later, I still have a media library that I am proud to show off but some things have changed. I have more kids movies, shows, and music than I ever had before and the wooden rack has gone the way of the Dodo. Now, digital storage and media servers rule and data access speeds, backups, and storage volume are the important factors. Recently, Drobo provided a look at their new 5D storage system, and I have to say, my media library has never looked better as it excels at all three factors.

The Drobo 5D features two high-speed interfaces, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. I ran all of my tests on a Mac Mini hosting our iTunes library and the Adobe Lightroom libraries for my wife’s photography business. Looking at the three factors I mentioned above, data access speeds, backups, and storage volume, let’s start with data access speeds. File accesses are fast. Very fast. Faster than I expected. My comparisons were against my existing, 2 drive, Western Digital USB 2.0 drive. Copies of media to and from the internal hard disk were much faster. This was without using any specific timing mechanism to measure the time, the copies just happened noticeably faster. From within the iTunes interface, if I selected a movie, the movie started quickly with little to no delay. My wife also noted a significant improvement in the utilization of her Lightroom libraries. Image database access, image modifications, sorting, and searching all executed faster, despite very large libraries filled with raw image data. One feature of the 5D is that, in addition to the space for five drives, there is an additional spot for an SSD, separate from the other drive bays. This SSD, if populated in what Drobo calls the Accelerator Bay, provides a level of data-tiering technology, ensuring that files that benefit from the speed of the SSD are available via that drive.

Backups are another important factor in modern media libraries. If you’re like me, you spend a non-trivial amount of time cultivating your media library. Painstakingly ensuring everything is properly tagged, has good cover art, and being generally meticulous about keeping the media library in good shape. If you’ve done all of that work and you’re not backing your library up, you are, potentially, one drive failure away from having to redo all of that work. Our current WD drive has two disks that I keep in a RAID 1, or mirrored, configuration, where the drives are kept as duplicates of each other. This brings my 2 TB drive down to 1 TB of useable space. With no room for more drives, I would need to add another dive to expand or to look at getting a speed acceleration from striping. Well, in my case, I am doing just that, starting to push out to an offsite backup. Honestly, I would prefer to have the speed of a striped array with the backup of a mirror, known as RAID 10 configuration in addition to offsite backups. This is an option offered by the Drobo that makes the whole system very attractive. The Drobo technology goes somewhat above and beyond the standard RAID definitions with something they call BeyondRAID technology and provides a level of flexibility in striping the drives and backing up the drives that is unprecedented in a non-enterprise level storage appliance.

Drobo 5D Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Interfaces (Image: Drobo)

Finally, there is the storage factor. With the Drobo 5D, you can really pack in the data. The drives Drobo shipped with the device for demonstration, the 5D offered 5 TB of storage in a purely striped mode. Let me tell you, looking at a drive and seeing 5 TB of useable space is fun. That is a lot of full 1080p video. Sure, my AppleTV only does 720p but I won’t always face that restriction. The space made my mouth water. The Drobo website has a configuration tool that lets you know how much drive space you will have given different size disks and selections between striping and mirroring. Assuming you have enough free space, going from a striped system, to a mirror, and back again is a breeze with the Drobo dashboard. The Dashboard also provides a lot of information on your drive’s health. The system will warn you you’re starting to run out of space, long before you actually run out, and can help you pick a drive to upgrade, move critical data off that drive, and replace the data on the new drive in a simple and straightforward manner.

There was one extremely difficult part of working through the Drobo review. Sending the system back when the review was over. My wife and I fell in love with the ease of use, speed, and expansion capabilities. The Drobo 5D retails for $843 on Amazon with no drives included. Part of the beauty of the system is that you can bring your own drives to the party. The 5D also has a little sibling, the Drobo Mini has 4 drive bays and only accepts 2.5″ drives but provides all of the same power as well as Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity. The Drobo mini retails on Amazon for $643. If you are looking for a drive solution that just works and can help ensure that it will be along time before you run out of space, ensure that you can get to your data quickly, and have the confidence of a backup, I would head over to the Drobo website and check it out.

The time has come for parents, students, and teachers to get ready for the start of a new school year. In addition to the normal notebooks, pens, pencils, and other standards, today’s students need to have storage for all of their digital project files. SanDisk has some new devices ready to meet the demands of students and teachers alike.

First up is an 8 gigabyte (GB) high-capacity SD card, the SanDisk Ultra. This is a nice little card well suited for camera storage. It is a Class 10 SD card, which means it must have a minimum speed of 10 megabytes (MB) per second (MB/s). I ran some benchmarks and found the transfer speeds actually reached up to the 30 MB/s as advertised on the packaging. The high speed means that images are written from your camera faster and the card is fast enough to keep up with high definition video. For the Raspberry Pi users thinking of using this for their set-up, I was not able to boot the Raspberry Pi off this SD card.

Next up are a pair of, functionally, fairly standard USB Flash drives. The SanDisk Cruzer Facet and the SanDisk Cruzer Pop. I ran some benchmarks on these drives, and they had speeds similar to the SD card which is perfect for a standard card. The Cruzer Facet comes in 3 colors and looks nice, which is always important to some for the “shiny” factor. The Cruzer Pop flips open with built-in protection for the very small USB connector. I love this feature for rolling around in my own backpack. The Cruzer Pop is now part of my standard carrying-around gear.

Finally, there is the SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 Flash Drive. This is a monster of a flash drive. Running the same benchmarks as the above devices yeilded staggering results. The average read speeds exceeded the packaging’s advertised 190 MB/s and actually tested at nearly 210 MB/s. The average write topped out at about 130 MB/s, slower than the number listed on the box, but the top write speeds topped out over 200 MB/s — well above the advertised speed. A full copy of my 3 GB Dropbox space took just under two minutes. The same copy with the USB 2.0 Cruzer Facet and Cruzer Pop took about twelve minutes. As I said, it is a beast of a flash drive.

Overall, I can recommend any and all of these devices. The Cruzer Facet and Cruzer Pop are excellent, compact USB 2.0 flash drives. The SanDisk Extreme Ultra SD card is a quick SD card. The SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 Flash Drive is a beast. If speed and storage capacity are paramount, this is the drive you want. Thanks to San Disk for providing the devices for review!

I usually host game nights at my home, where I have access to my entire board game collection within easy reach. But at times I’m called upon to bring some games to a friend’s house, or I’m traveling and want to take a few with me on a trip. At those times, I find myself wishing there were an easier way to transport games. Grumpy Owl Gamery is hoping to change that.

Board game boxes, I’ve already made clear, are primarily designed to sell the game: they take up lots of shelf space so you feel like they’re worth the price. Holding the components well is a secondary concern. That adds up to a lot of empty space (and easily crushed boxes) when you try to transport more than just a few games at a time in their original boxes. For a quick solution I just use one or two zippered cases that were originally intended for camping: they’re fairly sizable and can hold a few large game boxes vertically or a pile of small ones, and the handle on top makes it easier to carry two of these at a time.

Continuing (from last week) my coverage of hardware and software that gives my iPad a usefulness boost, I want to refer back to my review of the Seagate GoFlex Satellite. With that device, I was given 500GB of portable storage space for movies, music, photos, and more, all accessible via WiFi. The major benefit (at least to me) of the GoFlex Satellite is that you can take it with you. With its internal battery, you’ve got a maximum of 5 hours of streaming movies with your iPad. But what if you don’t need to take it with you? Or what if you need more than 500GB of storage space? Or, given the low price of today’s hard drives, what if you own a 1TB or even 2TB external USB drive and simply want to make it available to your iPad? Well, in any or all of these instances, you might want to take a look at the CloudFTP device.

The CloudFTP device was originally a Kickstarter project that was successfully funded back in January 2012. It’s now a retail product available for purchase by anyone, and it fills a much-needed gap for iPad users who have various mobile storage devices (such as cameras or hard drives) and wish to access them via WiFi. In a nutshell, you connect the CloudFTP device to a camera or hard drive or flash drive via a USB cable. The CloudFTP can either create an ad-hoc network that your iPad can see and join or it can join an existing WiFi network. Either way, your iPad will be able to browse (with the Safari app) the contents of the connected storage device. Depending on the device you have connected to the CloudFTP and the type of media, you can stream a movie to up to 3 different devices or music or photos to up to 8 different devices.

It provides a number of different services, including being able to backup data to cloud services such as Dropbox, but I’ve not actually used it to do so. Instead, I’ve configured it to make a 1TB external hard drive available to my iPad when I’m not traveling. There’s simply no reason to stream my movies and music from the GoFlex when I’m at home — I’d rather have the GoFlex Satellite charged and ready to go when I need it. Therefore, I’ve copied all my digital movies to the 1TB drive and stream movies with the CloudFTP while at home. The other benefit to the CloudFTP is that those same movies are available to my wife (and the kids’ movies are available to my sons) for her iPad when I’m away. (Another nice feature is that with AirPlay, I can stream movies with the CloudFTP to my iPad and then mirror the iPad’s screen to my HD TV using my Apple TV — my DVD player goes pretty much unused these days.)

Yesterday, I wrote about upgrading my home network. The router upgrade (to 802.11n) benefited all of my family’s devices, including the two iPads, the MacBook Air, and my wife’s 802.11g laptop that is now connected via HomePlug instead of WiFi. The biggest improvement from this upgrade has been the noticeable improvement in the two iPads’ connectivity. Downloading apps and streaming video have both improved, and given just how much I rely on my iPad these days for email, reminders, entertainment, and other functions, it was a much needed upgrade. But I’m not done.

For the past few weeks I’ve been testing a variety of hardware and software related to the iPad. When it comes to my iPad’s features and functionality, I’m pretty happy. I find myself using it more and more for email, web browsing, tweeting, and game playing. As a matter of fact, there are days when I don’t even touch my MacBook Air and instead rely solely on the tablet. I’ve even gone so far as to investigate whether I could make a complete jump to the iPad and lose the laptop entirely — but the somewhat obvious answer to that investigation is Not Yet.

This week (and maybe spilling over into next week) I’ll be sharing with you a few products that have really given my iPad a usefulness boost. The first piece of hardware I want to share with you today solves a big problem that many of us with iPads face, especially those who have a large number of apps or who like to store and watch movies. The problem is limited storage space. With iPads coming in only 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB models, it’s only a matter of time before iPad owners run out of space and have to start deleting apps and removing other content. But maybe not…

With the Seagate GoFlex Satellite, you get 500GB of portable storage. And when I say portable, I mean a WiFi capable device with its own internal battery power that is just a bit larger than your mobile phone.

One of the critical elements of the Superman mythos is the tacit information transfer from Jor-El to his son, despite the former having been blown to smithereens on Krypton years earlier. In the 1978 movie, the technology used is a memory crystal containing an artificial intelligence version of the late Jor-El acting as a guide to the sum of Kryptonian knowledge about the universe.

While the self-replicating properties of these crystals are still an unknown, real-life scientists are trying to unlock the data storage capabilities of glass. The process has resulted in a storage capacity of 50 GB (the equivalent of a Blu-ray Disc) on a slice of glass about the size of a mobile phone screen.

Researchers have found ways to store lots of data in glass.

Researchers from Optoelectronics Research Centre at Southampton University have developed a technique for computer memory using lasers and glass. This glass memory, they claim, is more stable than current storage techniques for hard drive memory, offering higher resistance to temperature, moisture and time. It is also about 20 times cheaper than current techniques.

The technique uses a silver dollar-sized circle of glass as an Optical Vortex Converter to create whirlpools of polarized light. A laser cuts tiny dots — 3D pixels, or voxels — into the surface, changing the opacity of the glass and giving optical detectors something to read. Data can be written and re-written into the molecular structure of the glass, a durable material that can withstand temperatures of 1800 degrees (F). The academic paper published in Applied Physics Letters is available online (PDF).

The ORC scientists who developed the technique and published their research are working with Altechna to bring the tech to market. As vortex drives work their way toward shelves at Best Buy, companies and institutions with large archives (like museums) can dream about eliminating the data protection cycles that force replacements of hard drives every 5-10 years.

I’m suddenly picturing my drawers of old Zip drives and CDs being replaced by a penholder filled with thin data rods containing all of our family photos, videos and media collection. When that happens, some company better make a memory crystal that glows green automatically when my child comes of age.